UNVEILING: Poems and Paintings

Robert Hershon, Elizabeth Hershon

Bob Hershon was one of four co-founders of Hanging Loose in 1966; he remained active with the press until his death in 2021. A widely published poet himself and a native Brooklynite, he was part of New York City’s poetry scene for more than a half-century.  

He also maintained a close connection with the New York art world, counting many painters among his friends. He brought his passion for the visual arts to Hanging Loose magazine—or perhaps he brought the magazine to the visual arts. Each issue presents a portfolio of paintings and cover art by one artist. 

Elizabeth Hershon, Bob’s daughter, is a painter, ceramicist, poet, teacher, and the art editor of Hanging Loose. She lives in the East Village, but grew up in Brooklyn. Bob approached her in 2020 with the idea of doing a book together: her paintings and his poems. The result is Unveiling.  

Cells of Terror

Alfonso Sastre

 The Cells of Terror consists of twenty-four stories, all very short, scientifically formulated, about the cells that are the origin of terror—which is to say, about a few of the key situations that sow in the hearts of human beings the monstrous seed of terror. As told by a variety of narrators whose perspective is both unflinching and darkly humorous, these tales encompass the visceral, the metaphysical, and the political in horror.

Alfonso Sastre (1926-2021) was a Spanish author best known as a Generation of ‘50 playwright, though he also wrote prose, poetry, essays, and screenplays. His work received numerous awards, including the Premio Nacional de Teatro (for La taberna fantástica) and the Premio Nacional de

Literatura Dramática (for Jenofa Juncal). Sastre is also known for his leftist political activism: his opposition to the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and support of Basque independence.

Ellis Ging is a librarian and translator based in New York with a particular in- terest in the horror genre. He has an MFA in Literary Translation as well as an MLS from CUNY Queens College. He is winner of the 2022 The Loose Translations Prize, an annual competition sponsored by Queens College, The City University of New York, and Hanging Loose Press, and open to students and alumni of the Queens College MFA program.

The Bastard and the Bishop

Gerald Fleming

“Gerald Fleming’s The Bastard and the Bishop is an awakening. Socially incisive and psychologically illuminating, it presents us with a full range of human passion and emotion. You didn’t know prose could sing, poetry could mean? Read The Bastard and the Bishop and see for yourself.”—Pablo Medina, Author of  The Cuban Comedy

“Fleming, a master of the prose poem, is never satisfied to sing the same song, and this adventuresome spirit pays dividends in these new prose poems. Constantly surprising and inventive, he offers stories within stories that effortlessly merge the personal and the archetypal, breathing new life into a genre that has increasingly, and often sadly, become predictable.—Peter Johnson, Author of Truths, Falsehoods, and a Wee Bit of Honesty: A Short Primer on the Prose Poem, with Selected Letters from Russell Edson

 “The crystalline vignettes in The Bastard and the Bishop let us drop into many hinted-at histories and subconscious motives. Fleming built these prose poems and their fragmented realities using small, collected phrases from a book he was gifted; those bits of language set him off toward mesmerizing perspectives. … [The Bastard and the Bishop]is a book of curiosities is a wonderland, a new way to journey through human interactions.”—Lauren Camp, Author of Took House

 Gerald Fleming is the author of  five books of poetry (three from HL) and numerous books for teachers. He taught for thirty-seven years in San Francisco’s public schools, has edited literary magazines traditional, epistolary, and vitreous, and recently edited  The Collected Poetry and Prose of Lawrence Fixel (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2020). He lives most of the year in the Far West, and, if there’s no plague occurring, part of the year in Paris.

Ghosts of America:

A Great American Novel

Caroline Hagood

In Ghosts of America, on one unforgettable night a sexist male novelist undergoes a peculiar transformation after being haunted by the ghosts of the women he has miswritten: Jackie Kennedy and Valerie Solanas.

Mary-Louise Parker has called Hagood’s work “profoundly unique and honest . . . somehow executed with an astonishing lack of ego. She will break your heart with her naked sincerity; a masterful, singular writer who sheds light with every page. ”

And Rachel Lyon, author of Self-Portrait with Boy, calls the novel a “rollicking feminist fantasy . . . irreverent, well-informed, dirty and smart, this novel is an absolute party.”  

Caroline Hagood is an Assistant Professor of Literature, Writing and Publishing and Director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. She has published two books of poetry, Lunatic Speaks (FutureCycle Press), and Making Maxine’s Baby (Hanging Loose), and one book-length essay, Ways of Looking at a Woman (Hanging Loose). Her writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon, and the Economist.

To A New Era

Joanna Fuhrman

Joanna Fuhrman’s new book is a fearless blend of the real and the surreal, the political and the personal, all with the marks of her own kind of accelerated dizzying style that nevertheless brings you along with it. Her work has been published in many journals, in including the Pushcart Prize Anthology (2011). She is the author of five previous full-length poetry collections, four of which have been published by Hanging Loose: Freud in Brooklyn, Ugh Ugh Ocean, Moraine, and The Year of Yellow Butterflies. Her books have been widely reviewed and praised; To a New Era is no exception.

“Joanna Fuhrman is the herald of a new era. An era where we eat more grandma slices but drink fewer papaya drinks. An era where the past wears its dirty underwear to every gala. An era where we all bake cakes shaped like the world we want to become. I welcome that world, that new era, because it will include these poems as proof that the world we wanted was not only possible but already here, and wonderful.”
—Sharon Mesmer

“Joanna Fuhrman’s got her own funky brand of blended surrealism and fabulism going on in To a New Era. The poems in this tour de force offer funicular modes of language transport, making it a dizzying, dazzling joy to be a commuter on this collection (see ‘Adjunct Commuter’ poems). Sentience abounds; metamorphoses are in the poetry’s plasma. Formal poems emit a flirty, contemporary spirit of rebellion. Political poems are pissed, hilarious, iconoclastic, in debate with language’s complicated connotations, histories, and alternate histories. In To a New Era, Fuhrman toasts to the cyclones that blow through our days and our nights. This collection is one storm of words that will bowl you over!”
—Martine Bellen

I Used To Be Korean

Jiwon Choi

Brooklyn poet, preschool teacher, and urban gardener, her work has been widely published in various online and print publications, including Painted Bride Quarterly, Bombay Gin, and Hanging Loose. Hanging Loose Press also published Choi’s earlier poetry collection, One Daughter Is Worth Ten Sons.

“These sharp-tongued poems, often levitating on their own buoyant wit, are full of Jiwon Choi’s delightful ‘wickedness and dirty humor.’ Her work is propelled by New York immigrant energy, which of course makes it quintessentially American.”—Terence Winch

“ ‘Buttering,’ bedazzling’ ‘shellacking,’ ‘kissing’ – in I Used to Be Korean, Jiwon Choi’s “present participles wrestle with the past tense, winning every match through sheer candor and vitality. The poet’s ‘rosebud power’ and honesty are dynamic, as is her grasp of history, family, identity, and eros. Out of keen attention, Choi makes poetry of butchery and blame and pockets empty but for lint. There’s something Sapphic—both scorching and tender—in a poem like ‘I Ate Your Heart Out,’ and something of Robert Frank’s vision in Choi’s fresh takes on, say, Texas (i.e., ‘America’). ‘Korea is far away’ from the Oyster Bar in Grand Central and many of the other sites mentioned in these poems, yet it (the mother) is ever present, whatever the poet is or ‘used to be.’ Choi is learned but never academic (she’s too nimble and street-smart to be academic), and I love her way of seeing and thinking. I Used to Be Korean (a riddle of a title) is a beautiful book.” —Linda Norton

Jam Session and other Poems

Dick Lourie

“Fusion” and “Synergy” are overused terms, but they aptly describe the relationship between music and poetry in Dick Lourie’s new book: these poems literally depend on the music for their existence; and the poems in turn have deepened the poet’s relationship with the music as he takes to the stage and performs it. The book reflects his professional work over a half-century as both poet and musician.